Lots of layoffs could be coming to Groupon after CEO's departure. / Charles Rex Arbogast, AP

by John Shinal, Special for USA TODAY

by John Shinal, Special for USA TODAY

Investors can learn important lessons from the disastrous tenure of ousted Groupon CEO Andrew Mason, and the most important one is this: Pay more attention to what a CEO does than what he (or she) says.

Back in November, Mason made news during an interview at a New York tech conference when he said: "If I ever thought I wasn't the right guy for the job, I'd be the first person to fire myself."

Those comments, which came the same week the daily deals site said its board had decided to keep Mason on, despite another disappointing quarter, caused Groupon's stock to jump 12%.

The share price move clearly showed that investors were optimistic about the possibility of his departure.

But given that Mason on Thursday sent a memo to Groupon employees that included the sentence "I was fired today," either his previous words weren't sincere, or he'd developed a very unconventional idea about what was best for shareholders.

Given that Groupon's stock shed 87% of its value in the year after its initial public offering, Mason remaining at the helm clearly wasn't in the best interest of Groupon investors.

That share-price performance was even worse than the 75% stock plunge overseen by Zynga CEO Mark Pincus in his company's first year of public trading.

It's why, when the final book is written on the raft of Internet companies that went public in 2011 and 2012, Mason will be a leading candidate for the title of worst CEO of his era.

Any investor capable of reading the financial documents that public companies must file with U.S. securities regulators could have seen this one coming.

Those filings revealed that Groupon's management was slipshod at best and that its business model amounted to little more than electronic junk mail.

It wasn't just that Groupon raced to hire roughly 10,000 employees without ever turning an annual profit - far more workers than other newly public companies such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Zynga.

Nor that the company had to restate its financial results numerous times - including three times before it even conducted its IPO.

The biggest red flag should have been the massive Groupon funding round in early 2011 that raised more money for Groupon insiders than it did for the company.

Granted, Groupon wasn't the only Internet firm whose executives and early investors treated their companies like ATMs by withdrawing hundreds of millions of dollars of equity even before selling shares to the public.

Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Zynga insiders all availed themselves of the liquidity of private markets to do just that - and on a scale that dwarfed the pre-IPO cash-outs of earlier tech executives.

Yet no other Internet company was doing so while also piling up as much red ink - nor running afoul of SEC regulators - as Groupon.

The company's internal financial reporting procedures were so weak that its own auditors refused to sign off on its full-year results for 2011, forcing it into yet another restatement last year.

Now, with Mason gone, Groupon's long-suffering shareholders may finally be able to look forward to better days.

Many Groupon employees, however, likely won't have the benefit of the same opportunity.

With the departure of a CEO whose most obvious talents included hiring as many workers - and selling as much Groupon stock - as fast as possible, the company will almost certainly begin laying people off.

Comments made by Groupon COO Kal Raman on a conference call, regarding the company's effort to improve its "operating leverage," were thinly veiled Wall Street code that the pink slips will be going out later this year, and perhaps soon.

A good portion of any firings will likely come overseas, where Groupon employs 7,000 workers but where it's struggled to turn surging sales into profits.

I can't help but wonder what opinions some of the soon-to-be axed workers will have of Mason's farewell letter, which contained about the same level of glibness as the letter he wrote to shareholders in the company's IPO filing.

"For those who are concerned about me, please don't be - I love Groupon," the multimillionaire wrote to employees, the vast majority of whom never made a dollar on their Groupon stock grants.

It may prove true that no CEO could have helped Groupon succeed in a market which - based on the current financial trends of the company and its rivals - will likely support some of the thinnest profit margins on the Internet.

But it's already proved true for Groupon shareholders and workers alike that Andrew Mason wasn't "the right guy" to lead the effort.